"everything will be different now"

losing a daughter and a new alignment with language

I have a new fiction piece, “Window,” in the Chicago Review, published yesterday.

This is what I came here to share. What follows caught me by surprise.

—

I last posted here in November of 2023, to announce the acceptance of all six pieces from my short story collection Slight for publication. In that post, which I deleted at some point last year, I recounted the genesis of each story and—as an addendum, almost—offered these thoughts:

“Writing these stories allowed me to revisit different versions of my child self, my girlhood self, in a way that hadn’t been possible by other means. Girlhood is cruel and in many ways these stories are, too. But the girls themselves are watchful and curious. I love them for that.

One strange circumstance of this collection is that the same month I finished editing it and putting it into book form, my wife and I found out that she is pregnant with a baby girl. In March, I am still stunned to report, I’ll be a mother. And as an older mother once told me, ‘motherhood is a kind of death.’ For me, perhaps the timely death of my girlhood.

I’m still grappling with what it means to bring a little girl into this porcine world. But I read these stories differently now: as preparation.”

—

On March 3rd of last year, four days before our baby’s due date, my my wife and I climbed into our car and raced to the hospital. In the span of twenty minutes we learned both that my wife was in early labor and that our baby was dead. Later, we would learn that a knot in the umbilical cord that no one knew was there had spontaneously tightened, cutting off blood flow.

In the river of anguish following our loss, we let ourselves be pulled under for a while and knocked about. For me, part of this meant looking back on these stories with disgust. They seemed to prophesy our loss, to prepare me not for motherhood, but for the most deranged nightmare. Whatever cruelty initially motivated them felt like a mockery of the one I was now experiencing—the worst part being that it had seized my beloved wife and child, pulled them, too, into its stygian vortex.

But this darkness was shot through with moments of exquisite tenderness: my wife’s soft cheek against mine, prayers whispered in the nursery, the bright green of spring’s arrival, an orchid that bloomed the day we returned from the hospital, our dog’s steadfastness by my side. Our daughter’s presence—her magnificence—began to stake its claim over her death. She seemed to quiet the world, to strip it of language and sense-making, and render it more beautiful, more saturated, and more precious in spite of its brutality.

In the days after her death, a mentor of mine held my shoulders in both hands and said, “Everything will be different now.” Of all the things people said to me in my early grief, somehow this sober acknowledgment comforted me most.

Weeks later, on the phone with my friend Jourdain, I told her, “I just can’t understand how a knot, of all things, killed our baby. Knots are supposed to bind, to bring things close.” She gently responded, “Not all knots are made to bind. Some knots are created to make other knots.”

So, here’s to making new knots in honor of Theo Wren Holtzmann.

If you’re ever in Oak Park, overlooking the playground of Taylor Park there is a very tall linden tree and a plaque with her name: “Nested always in our hearts.” Maybe give it a little kiss.